Cleanliness is Next To Impossible

By Peggy | October 26, 2011 |

The problem with putting your house on the market is that people come over. And before they do, you have to clean it.

A lot.

And not that Erma Bombeck way, where you just give it a sweeping glance.

Opening our lives this way has been traumatic for Sam, but he’s getting better. I got just a little ptsd leftover from when we sold our home in California in 1993. At the time, I was pregnant and chasing two preschoolers. We lived in a 1,100-square-foot house with a forest of tubas in a “hot zip.” Real estate agents were supposed to call and schedule a visit, but they would sometimes pull up to the curb and “call.”

After a while, I gave up. They could just tour a messy house — dirty diapers, toys, dishes, tubas, and all.

Here, we live too far off the beaten path for people to take a chance on pulling up and getting permission to see the house. But I am tired of always being “on” with the cleaning. This market is a lot tougher. I’ve got the place priced competitively, so we have too many people coming through. Some rooms in the house have taken on a museum-like quality.

My mother has that kind of tidiness in her house. My sisters do, too, at least in certain rooms.

I’ve not ever been that way. It’s not like I don’t know that I should clean the refrigerator once a month to discourage listeria, but it’s amazing how long I can go when I think no one is looking.

I vowed to get better the day that Michael and Paige came running into the office — I was writing something — to announce that a spider nest hatched because there were a thousand baby spiders on the living room ceiling.

They thought it was really cool, but decided that leaving it to nature wasn’t a good idea. And there really were a thousand baby spiders on the ceiling. I vacuumed for about an hour.

After that, we worked out something called Hour of Power. We put about two dozen small cleaning jobs on slips of paper in a bowl, the kids would roll the dice and take turns picking jobs on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Mark and I would do the tough stuff, like mop the floors or address whatever disaster had been waiting all week (the refrigerator, for example.) By the time we were done, it looked good and lasted almost til the next Hour of Power.

Those were the good ole days.

Well, back to cleaning.

Posted in problem-solving, rants

Propped Against The Meyerson Wall

By Peggy | October 23, 2011 |


Random thoughts from today’s half-marathon (a first for me, for Dallas and for the guy in front of us at the porta-potties).

Following the crowd can be a good strategy, unless you are looking for a parking place. After running 13.1 miles, it’s wicked difficult to get out of your truck and walk up your drive. Just because the main architectural feature of a Highland Park house is rustication, it doesn’t mean the occupants don’t have a sense of humor. Some of the Katy Trail bounces. Volunteers give out water and Powerade. Angels pass out strawberries. The best freebie wasn’t the finisher’s medal with the 13.1 time turner (needed that really badly about Mile 10), the Oreos (which I’m chewing in this picture), the mini-muffin, the orange, the water, the Powerade or the pretzels. It was the pre-moistened, Texas-size, super fresh, moist towel. There are still places in the city where you can sit on your steps on a Saturday morning, in your robe, drink your coffee and watch your granddaughter watch the world go by.

Posted in health, hope

Overheard in the Wolfe House #139

By Peggy | October 20, 2011 |

Peggy: I’m not sure dinner turned out.
Sam: The smell doesn’t bother me. Are you sure it didn’t turn out?
Peggy: It’s not what I expected.
Sam (lifts lid of wok): What’s the smell?
Peggy: Peanut sauce.
Sam: That doesn’t bother me. (pause) But I’m not taking the tofu.

Posted in What Sam says

Southern Impolite Meets a Yankee Can of Whoop-Ass

By Peggy | October 15, 2011 |

(Note to readers: This is not one of my best moments. I’m exploring events from our lives for the next book, in hopes that there are lessons and wisdom in these experiences. Or, at minimum, a good chuckle. Let’s see what happens with this one.)

At the end of Sam’s second-grade year, the kids and I went with Mark to Shreveport for a year-end concert with the Shreveport Symphony Orchestra.

It was a great opportunity for the kids to see their dad perform as the tubist in the orchestra. Most concert settings are so formal, even I had hard time behaving.

The Shreveport Symphony had always held their year-end concert in the convention center. They put out round tables and lots of kitschy decorations around the room. Some people decorated their tables, too, and of course the food and wine flowed as the symphony played a pops program.

The acoustics were horrible — there was a level of background noise in the room that I’m sure made it a real challenge for the guys on the mixing board. But a great time was always had by all.

The kids and I sat in the back with some other symphony friends at our table and at tables around us. Given how young the kids were — Sam was 8, Michael was 5 and Paige not quite 3 — I was thrilled how well they behaved. Especially Sam. He didn’t get up and run around the tables. He wiggled and fidgeted some in his seat. Sometimes he would slip down and stand up next to his chair, but at his size, he wasn’t tall enough to block the view for any one around us.

This was a huge accomplishment for him. We had worked hard during second grade to help Sam learn to stay in his seat and pay attention. He had such trouble with it at the beginning of the year that his teacher had begun to send him out to the hallway with his aide when he couldn’t sit still. While I could see her point that he was a distraction for the other kids in the class, the aide noticed that sending him out in the hallway was reinforcing the problem. She got worried. I called Kevin Callahan, a special education professor at the University of North Texas at the time. He came to observe and designed a little intervention that helped Sam teach himself to stay in his seat and pay attention. It was brilliant and it worked.

But Sam’s behavior wasn’t perfect, and even though his little brother and sister wiggled and fidgeted, too, Sam’s wiggles got the attention of one woman a table or two away. She would watch Sam. She would whisper to the people at her table. It was hard not for me to notice I was being judged, too.

I did my best to ignore the Chinese water torture of her judgment. We were making some good memories and I didn’t want to give her the power to spoil it.

After the concert ended, people began packing up their tables. Sam, Michael and Paige rushed to the stage to hug their dad and meet the other musicians. I stayed behind to pack up our things. I looked up to see the woman was approaching me.

She began to tell me what she thought was wrong with Sam.

I listened patiently for her to get to her stopping point. I told her that actually I was quite proud of my son because he has autism and his dad was performing and this was about the best he had sat still and paid attention this whole year.

Then she smiled this treacly smile and said, “Well, I am a teacher of the emotionally disturbed and in my experience …”

I lost it.

I leaned forward and yelled, “Get out of my face.”

She looked stunned. But she didn’t move.

“Get out of my face!” I yelled again.

She took a step back.

“I said, get out of my face!”

Rule of three, she finally went back to her friends.

I was ashamed of myself for losing my cool. And a little grateful that the room was full of ambient noise, enough that only the woman and her friends knew what had happened between us. Maybe another table, but that was about it. The kids and Mark never heard it.

I walked very deliberately towards the stage. I could feel the woman and her friends watching me. I told Mark what had happened and turned and pointed to the woman. He studied her. She and her friends finished packing up and left.

“Do I need to go over there and do something?” he asked.

“Nah,” I said. “I don’t think she’ll bother another autism parent again in her life.”

Posted in getting back on the horse, love, social life

Things I Never Knew I Was Waiting For

By Peggy | October 10, 2011 |

I’m fond of telling my kids that their grandkids will be in awe of their childhood experiences — all of what a computer couldn’t do, how crude a smartphone was, how brutal medical practices seemed (that last idea comes courtesy of Star Trek IV The Voyage Home).

I tried to apply that perspective to all kinds of situations in raising Sam. Being aware that you are in pioneering territory is helpful. Lots of people have come before us to do the Lewis and Clark equivalent of defining the landscape of accommodating someone with a disability and laying the groundwork with the public policy that opened up this new frontier of living with a disability.

I try to remember this journey as the Wolfe family Conestoga wagon settling the autism frontier. Nearly every day something new, something without precedent. Sometimes it’s exhilarating. Sometimes the risks are clear and present. And always, always, exhausting.

The pioneering days of speech therapy are behind us. If someone in the discipline was interested in a exit interview, I have things to say about what worked and what didn’t. I would imagine Sam does, too.

Never was that more clear than when I read the following line in Diane Ackerman’s book, One Hundred Names for Love (a book about her husband’s stroke and continuing recovery from aphasia, which has some interesting similarities to Sam’s speech impairment). She describes a scene where her husband, Paul West, also an imaginative writer, struggles with fill-in-the-blank worksheets meant to help him regain his ability to talk.

“Choosing the correct answer could be as tough as herding cats. But, like most people, I did know the accepted answer. Selecting it, I had to ignore all other answers that spring to mind or were truer to my experience.”

Correct is not the same as accepted.

Furthermore, we cannot ascribe too much meaning when a client cannot come up with the accepted answer.

I tried to explain that in my book, when I relayed Sam’s experience of confronting vocabulary cards with images of things he’d never seen before. Diane absolutely knocked it out of the park, explaining the inherent social context of many speech exercises.

I think it could be a much bigger problem than those working in speech therapy might realize.

Throughout the book she describes “deliciously ambiguious words” and takes us on verbal joy rides with them. She sprinkles phrases without context and then gives us a fun house worth of perspectives to show how much we depend on context for meaning.

I wish I knew that two decades ago. I can only imagine how much better his speech therapy would have been. I wish I knew that a month ago when we were hit again with this problem.

I wish I knew these things I never knew I was waiting for.

Posted in early intervention, language, problem-solving